Thursday, June 26, 2014

World Bank finds Green Technology saves money and creates jobs Gee, will wonders ever cease? It's hard not to be cynical. I have found reports to this effect going back ten or more years. So why did it take so long for the World Bank to get on the band wagon? Not exactly a group strong on "thinking outside the box" or "thinking ahead of the curve"! The absurd delay in smelling the coffee suggests another label: "reactionary". The uber-honchos at the World Bank appear to react to, but do not initiate change. And these guys - mostly guys, I notice - are supposed to be the World's Leaders, duh..

"Increasing renewable energy has the potential to create still more jobs.
In 2009, the Union of Concerned Scientists conducted an analysis of the
economic benefits of a 25 percent renewable energy standard by 2025; it
found that such a policy would create more than three times as many
jobs as producing an equivalent amount of electricity from fossil
fuels—resulting in a benefit of 202,000 new jobs in 2025"

So now the World Bank, which wrecked so many 3rd world economies and got them off on a bad "development" trajectory, has finally seen the light of day..wow! Yawn.

Even governments are (somewhat) aware of Climate Change. For example, the risks of sea level rise on the South East coast of the USA. All these insights, of course, conveniently manage to disappear around election time when the mantras of "economy - not ecology - stupid!" are endlessly repeated to hypnotize the consumer culture besotted masses.

Karl Marx: "religion is the opiate of the masses". He said this way back in the 19th century. Consumerism has to some degree replaced religion as the 20th and 21st century mass opiate. Consumption functions like an addictive process conditioned by insidious omnipresent marketing. Do we feel down? Well, just go to the local shopping mall for a fix: the brain circuits activated are similar! Does the dying world frighten us? Consuming shows us that we not only exist (that we are not in danger of imminent disolution) but that we are "better" - have more social status - than those that cannot consume as much. (Vicious and constantly increasing social inequality is therefore inherent to the current economic system. It cannot be eradicated or simply reduced to "natural" levels without destroying or profounding modifying that system in some way..)